Wednesday, August 14, 2013

It was a great pleasure to last week share the photography trail with Sandra Phillips; here as guest of the Auckland Art Fair and keynote speaker plus teacher at AUT University's annual Photography Workshop. In both these capacities Sandra acquitted herself with a tremendous generosity of spirit and a ready willingness to share her remarkable knowledge of the photo world accumulated over her many years as chief curator photography at San Francisco MoMA.

Auckland Art Fair - panel discussion

On Thursday of last week Sandra participated in a panel discussion at the Art Fair moderated by senior Auckland Art Gallery curator Ron Brownson together with photographers Marie Shannon, Yvonne Todd and myself. We opened up a conversation, What Photography Sees? - Looking passionately at the world. From my side of the table it seemed to be a lively hour.
On Friday night Sandra delivered her keynote address to the Art Fair, a presentation talking about her landmark 2010 exhibition - EXPOSED, Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera since 1870.

AUT University - Photography Worshop

The weekend was spent at AUT University, presenting in their new Sir Paul Reeves building an intense two days of photography discussion together with portfolio reviews. The thirteen participants received affirmative feedback on their work and ideas for ways forward. Sandra talked about the SFMoMA photography collection and presented her Art Fair keynote address to the workshop.
Sandra Phillips' invitation to Auckland came out of me talking to Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel in Paris last November. Both Lewis and Hank raved about Sandra and among other things commented on what a charming person she is. They were 100% right.

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz